Indie Game: The Movie

From left, Tommy Refenes and Edmund McMillen in "Indie Game: The Movie."Credit
Indie Game: The Movie

Struggling artists can welcome the practitioners of a new medium to their ranks, as persuasively shown by Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky’s tenderly wrought portrait of four video game designers. A welcome primer for the uninitiated, “Indie Game: The Movie” lays bare the passion behind the pixels, revealing the sweat, tears and sleep deprivation that go into trying to make the latest gaming sensation.

The lucrative video game industry is already the subject of obsessive evaluation online and academic scrutiny at universities. Instead of large companies, Ms. Pajot and Mr. Swirsky choose the smaller scale of independent designers, whose shoestring productions and headlong financial and emotional investments recall their indie equivalents in filmmaking.

Before succumbing to the protracted countdown to a big gaming expo, “Indie Game” succeeds where many chronicles of more established creative spirits fail. Conveying oft-derided aesthetics and anguished personal history to a broader audience is some kind of a feat when your subjects are toiling away at an old-school Super Mario-style game called Super Meat Boy.

But only the hardhearted could dismiss the vulnerable, harried and rather sweet creators of Super Meat Boy, Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes. And you may not be able to look away from Phil Fish, all nerves, as he proclaims his intention to kill himself or his estranged business partner if his long-gestating pseudo-Cubist game Fez does not come to fruition. (Not to worry: It became available on the Xbox downloadable games marketplace last month.) Jonathan Blow, a longtime veteran, is the Old Man River among them, yet still hyperconscious of fan expectations.

“Indie Game” experiences a drop-off in playability after a while, losing its detailed perspective on the gamer world and on behemoths like Microsoft in favor of the diminishing returns of pressure-based narrative. But along the way comes a bracing, honest confession about these interactive creations, voiced by one designer but no doubt applying to many more makers of all kinds: “I made it for myself.”